Day: March 23, 2010

Written by Enda Walsh, produced by Ireland’s Druid Theatre company, this intense, dense play held the Opera House audience in its thrall. It’s set in a tiny apartment in London where an Irish emigre and his two sons re-enact daily a traumatic experience from their past, using the form and structure of farce, complete with corny jokes, over-complicated plans, and mad dashing from room to room. There’s so much going on, in the play-within-a-play and its morass of characters, in the interplay between the family members, in their interactions with their apartment which tells its own tales about who and what they are, that it was genuinely hard to keep up. (Reviews had mentioned a lot of people wondering what the heck was going on; at our performance I didn’t hear any such murmurs during the intermission.) I’m sure there was a lot of Ireland-England subtext going on that went over my head too.

The farce is very funny all the way through, but as the reality under the farce unfolds it becomes impossible to keep laughing. This is a very bleak play indeed. It’s technically fascinating and hugely engaging and suspenseful, and I enjoyed it very much almost through to the conclusion. Unfortunately, I thought the end didn’t work at all; it felt like a retreat from the rest of the play, rather than a resolution of it, not to mention that it relied on melodramatic contrivance at the very moment when it cried out for something genuine. The conclusion didn’t spoil the experience, though, and most of the audience seemed very happy with it so perhaps it was just me.

I walked out of the theatre with much to think about, and very happy with what we’d seen. Worth watching, should the opportunity arise.

(Thanks to my parents for the tickets!)